Tag Archives: Espionage

I’m not a fan of the Henry Jackson Society, a British think tank that has the reputation of consisting of uber-hawkish neo-conservatives. Henry Jackson members come across as the kind of guys who even now think that invading Iraq was the right thing to do. You can judge their credibility by the fact that their guest speaker today is Timothy Snyder, who’s giving a talk about his truly awful book The Road to Unfreedom – you know, the one which says that Putin’s a fascist because he quotes Ivan Ilyin. In short, the Henry Jackson Society isn’t the sort of place you should visit if you want to be well informed about Russia. Unfortunately, however, you have to pay a bit of attention to what it’s saying. For it represents the viewpoint of an extreme, but not unimportant, segment of Britain’s ruling elite.

The Society’s Russia & Eurasia Studies Centre has just come out with a new report. Its title Putin Sees and Hears it All: How Russia’s Intelligence Agencies Menace the UK gives the gist – Putin’s espionage network is massive and growing, and Russia’s evil dictator ‘sees and hears it all’. He truly is all knowing!

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I am distressed at the shocking lack of faith shown by so many people in the exposé of Donald Trump’s Russian connections recently published on BuzzFeed. Judging by the sceptics’ attitudes, you’d think that the report was written by some vacuum cleaner salesman trying to earn a little bit of money to pay for his daughter’s pony club membership. As if!! Human intelligence compiled from anonymous sources is known to be the most reliable basis on which to form judgements about important events. Nothing else provides such detailed insider information from the very heart of enemy institutions.

It is time people knew the truth. I have decided that it is necessary to reveal my own notes from underground (scribbled on a table napkin in invisible ink this morning and just now squirted with lemon juice). I cannot, of course, identify my sources, but I might suggest that you look up Richard Meinertzhagen’s ‘dirty paper method’ (see footnote). I can also claim that I have access to the highest echelons of the Russian government through somebody who knows somebody, who is related to somebody, who went to school with somebody, whose neighbour sharpens Vladimir Putin’s hockey skates.

These sources of mine tell me that the plot to place Donald Trump in the White House was hatched not five years ago as claimed in the BuzzFeed report, but 13 years ago at an exclusive banya in Sokolniki.

According to Source BS, the concept for what became known as Operatsiia Tuz emerged during a sweaty discussion over a dozen bottles of vodka, when oligarch Viktor Bogatyi announced that he had an idea for a new television show. Aspiring kleptocrats would audition for a job as Bogatyi’s assistant and the losers would be eliminated one by one with his famous catchphrase ‘You’re shot!’ Hearing this, a senior GRU agent, Max Otto von Stierlitz, after a pause of seventeen moments, suggested an alternative. Why not, said Stierlitz, pass the idea for the TV show on to Donald Trump to use as a vehicle for making himself popular among the American people? It would be the perfect mechanism to gradually push the Donald into a position from which he could become President of the United States of America. The rest, as they say, is history.

Source VK adds that the FSB later tried to compromise Trump during a stay in Moscow at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. To this end, the FSB tried to lure him into a liaison with a woman from Leningrad, alluringly dressed up in Louboutin shoes and truly awesome jeans. Unfortunately, Trump refused to be compromised, preferring instead the company of a respectable lady with a lapdog. An attempt to get Trump intoxicated at a drinks stand in Patriarch’s Pond also failed when the stand turned out not to have any drinks, and Trump got distracted by a large black cat.

In a final twist, Source RT reveals that the FSB’s active measures unit decided to turn Operatsiia Tuz into a classic provokatsiia, building on years of experience in maskirovka. As part of a subordinate operation, (Operatsiia Tresk), a former KGB agent known only as Opperput arranged for details of Operatsiia Tuz to be leaked to the American Democratic Party. The expectation was that the Democratic Party would covertly pass the information to the press, which would use it to defame Donald Trump. The final step would then be to feed the full details directly to the public once Trump won the presidency, thereby revealing the Democrats’ dirty tricks and exposing their willingness to plumb the lowest depths of political sleaze. This final stage of Operatsiia Tuz reached its brilliant climax with the BuzzFeed story yesterday.

Due to the highly sensitive nature of the contents above, readers are advised to shred themselves immediately upon finishing this report.

Footnote: See Richard Occleshaw, Armour against Fate: British Military Intelligence in the First World War. Meinertzhagen recorded in his diary how he rescued Grand Duchess Tatiana Nikolaevna from Ekaterinburg in a small plane in 1918. His famous honesty, which extended also to his extensive (and not at all fraudulently assembled) bird collection, is testimony to the immense trustworthiness of former British intelligence officers. I assure readers that everything in this report is equally reliable.

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When reading an intelligence report, it is advisable to distinguish between those parts of the report which are raw information and those which are comments. Intelligence analysts are trained to make this distinction clear. One method is to place raw information in a column on one side of the page and commentary in a separate column on the other side. Another way is to put the word ‘COMMENT’ before any commentary, and to put ‘END OF COMMENT’ at the end. A reader can then evaluate whether a comment seems justified in light of the supporting facts.

With this in mind, let us now turn to the unclassified report released to the public yesterday by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, entitled ‘Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.’

The report doesn’t do a very good job of separating fact and comment. But it does regularly use the phrase ‘We assess.’ Readers can presumably take anything preceded by this phrase as being equivalent to a comment. So let us look at the report’s assessments, and see what facts are used to justify them. Among the quotations which follow, those which I consider to state facts, rather than opinions, are highlighted in bold.